The lease did promise Quiet Enjoyment
Knock on wood, I have pretty good Apartment Karma. The worst neighbour I’ve ever had was my first neighbour: a stay-at-home crazy person who woke me after my first night in my suite by hammering on our shared wall with both fists and screaming FUCKERS!!! over and over again.
(It’s funny now, but at the time I felt like Tom Hanks in Big when he spends his first night in that fleabag hotel and it’s all gunshots and sirens. I was pretty young, and fresh out of living at home.)
I’ve had other notable neighbours, of course: the partiers, the orgasm dramatists, The Girl Who Sobs at Midnight.
I once lived in a building full of yahoos who set off the smoke detectors every weekend with their fire extinguisher fights. I was once confronted by a neighbour who objected to the volume of my music, because she was trying to sleep… at 3pm. (And my music was at a reasonable volume, I assure you.)
For over a year there was a man living above me who I named Koldplay Karl because he practiced on his electric guitar at all hours and he seemed to be going for that Chris Martin sound.
Nobody’s ever tried to kill me, though. All right? They haven’t.
All I can ever do to replicate that particular watershed experience is re-watch The 4th Floor, as solid a film about the finer points of the Residential Tenancy Act as you’re ever going to see in this life.
Juliette Lewis plays Jane, a young interior designer who somehow inherits her aunt’s lease when the old bat takes such a hard spill down the stairs that her head leaves a giant crater in the wall on impact. William Hurt’s corpse plays Jane’s boyfriend Greg, a ruthless celebrity weatherman. Rounding out the cast are Austin Pendleton and Shelley Duvall as Jane’s wacky new neighbours, and the incomparable Tobin Bell as The Creepy Locksmith.
Jane and Greg are just about to close on a house in Westchester, but Jane’s “inheritance” changes everything. She’s always had roommates, and now that the opportunity has presented itself, she wants to try living alone.
(The movie offers no explanation for her about-face, but I submit that it might have something to do with Greg’s new TV promo, which is meant to make him look so fucking hardcore about weather, but really looks like a cheap local ad from the 80s. Jane does say she likes it, but she looks seriously grossed out.)
Greg suggests subletting the suite–and speculates that Jane could get as much as $3,000 a month for it, which is hilariously low for a beautiful pre-war apartment in Manhattan that spans one entire floor of the building–but Jane’s like, sorry for partying, nerdhole. You go ahead and move to Westchester, though. Maybe there’s an X-Man who can reanimate you!
She settles in quickly, befriending her neighbours and avoiding Momo the Idiot Man Mountain (who despite straddling the line between average and developmentally disabled has somehow been appointed as the building’s superintendent,) but every time she tries to put her apartment together, she incurs the wrath of the mysterious tenant downstairs.
An old lady lives there, supposedly, but aside from the pounding on the ceiling whenever Jane makes a sound, the only signs of her are the trash bags full of Styrofoam peanuts she leaves on the landing, and the ominous shifting of her door’s peephole: a cantaloupe-sized monstrosity that telescopes outward and turns from side to side.
Jane tries to accommodate her at first, but there ain’t no way to move furniture and hang pictures silently. Fed up with the pounding, she starts getting careless, and soon, a thick sheaf of paper detailing the old lady’s many, many inflexible rules for peaceable neighbourship is shoved under Jane’s door while she sleeps.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, it ends, AND NOW THERE WILL BE NO FORGIVENESS.
And she’s fucking serious, dude.
The skirmish escalates very quickly, and a little too believably–till the third act, at least.
At one point, the neighbour arranges to release dozens of mice in Jane’s apartment. First you’re like, oookaaay, but then you’re like, remember when your friend Darla’s landlord let himself in to her suite while she was sleeping and washed her dishes without her consent? Bitches be crazy.
What is the old bag’s deal? Why doesn’t this building have a landlord? How many of the movie’s numerous sinister characters are genuine villains, instead of giant, throbbing dicks?
There are only two ways to find out, and I’m not inviting you over sight unseen.
Other points to ponder during your decision-making process:
· Apart from William Hurt, the cast is fantastic. Juliette Lewis will punch your grandma in the mouth for a dollar. Austin Pendleton is the goofy god of my heart and feelings. Tobin Bell plays heinous pricks in most of his films, but no matter what, somehow I always want to take him out for Egg McMuffins and ask him what he thinks about God.
· The movie is so gummed up with ham-fisted misdirection that you stop believing anything anybody says about fifteen minutes in.
· Momo the Idiot Man Mountain lives in the basement, in the building’s storage room. He doesn’t even have a door; he’s set up his tragic little cot and his tragic little hotplate and his tragic gigantic pot of baked beans in a tiny alcove just off the main room.
· Greg’s lousy ad spot really is the worst. It makes Gordy Dodd look like Martin Scorsese.
Come on, just try it. Please? If nothing else, you can laugh at them for ever trying to pass New Brunswick off as New York. They might as well have shot it in Swaziland.
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I think that furniture commercial is actually my favorite thing ever.
Matt, you should do a search for “dodd’s furniture” on YouTube. Since it’s based in Victoria, I can tell you of a certainty that Gordy has been making shitty furniture ads for something like 30 years now.
He turns into the Incredible Hulk one time when he has too much inventory.
I have to say, that commercial and his “dancing” did turn my pupils into little hearts.
You should come visit and we can watch The 4th Floor! I love to hate William Hurt.
You should rent it. The earliest I can get down to see you now is Christmas, and that’s if I’m lucky. Nobody should have to wait that long to see him dance!